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Making use of Gateway Vivitron monitor

Hi all,

I just picked up an old Gateway 2000 Vivitron 19" monitor but when I connect it to my machine and boot up Mandrake a message 'Signal out of range' appears. Obviously a driver issue, but in MCC although there are Gateway monitors listed, they seem to be later models ie; Vivitron 15, 17 & 20. As it's a little arkward to get at the back of my PC and my normal monitor has a bad connection which makes it messy to restore, does anyone know if I can get a driver for this monitor (it'd have to work with SuSE as well 'cause that's another O.S. I can boot into) or if any of the other drivers will do and if yes, which one to select.

It's probably just a matter of setting your horizontal and vertical sync in xorg.conf. Usually, you can find those values on the back of your monitor. Suse would probably be easier to use to configure xorg until you get it working, because sax runs in ncurses (non-gui) mode.

There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence.

I was at an I.T exhibition in Dublin today that had a few Linux stands. Mandrake were there, Linux.ie too and SuSE as well. At one of the stands, I was talking about this issue and the rep was suggesting what you mention. I couldn't follow everything, 'cause I'm still a newbie but he told me to save the current settings of XORG before making any changes by typing this command as root;

cp /etc/x11/xf86config -4 /root/

and to restore;

cp /root/xf86config -4 /etc/x11/

if these commands are correct, I can save my current monitor settings, change the monitor type in MCC , plug in the 19" Gateway, see what happens and if it goes wrong, bring up a root console at boot by using the 'Control - Alt- F1' command, then typing 'telinit 3'. I can then type the restore command.

Is this all correct, or better still, is there an easier way? I'm afraid if I change the default monitor that I won't be able to see anything on the screen when I plug back in the normal monitor.